Hardship

“ We give up everything for the sake of being out of doors. Put him down when he gets heavy."
"He's all right. Yes, hardship in many ways. But hardships make us stronger; still, I don't know that we need to be much stronger. We are strong enough now for our weak purposes." ”

“ We agree that hardship, enforced effort, anxiety and fear, danger and even poverty itself may be the environment in which the meaner tendencies of men are corrected, and by which the manly and humane virtues all too rare are cultivated and established. ”

“ The very greatest things—great thoughts, discoveries, inventions—have usually been nurtured in hardship, often pondered over in sorrow, and at length established with difficulty. ”

“ You have difficulties, and privations, and dangers enough to struggle with. You are always labouring and toiling, exposed to every risk and hardship. Your home, country, friends, all quitted. Neither time, nor health, nor life to be called your own. ”

“ But first consider how much more sparing and patient of hardship the poor are than we. ”

“ Many have seen the Hardships of the Poor, felt an eager Desire that their Children may be put in a Way to escape [Pg 227] these Hardships; but how few have continued in that pure Love which openeth our Understandings to proceed rightly under these Difficulties! ”

“ Let them remember that a time of distress is a time of dreadful temptation, and all the strength to resist is taken away; poverty presses, the soul is made desperate by distress, and what can be done? ”

“ What would they think—those three hundred speech-tired boys—if some man who had been held before them as exemplary were to rise and lay bare his own life—its weaknesses, its faults, perhaps its crimes—and tell them there was weakness and there was strength in every human being, and that the world-old struggle of life was to overcome one's weakness with one's strength. ”

“ You carry a burden on your back whether you realise the fact or no, a burden that clogs all your efforts, and that will sink you deeper into the darkness and the mire. 'Come unto Me, all ye that labour,' and with noble, but, at bottom, vain, efforts have striven after right and truth. 'Come unto Me all ye that are burdened,' and bear, sometimes forgetting it, but often reminded of its pressure by galled shoulders and wearied limbs, the burden of sin on your bent backs. ”

“ Why am I called upon to do this, oh cruel, most cruel destiny? Cannot I fly from the horrid scene? Cannot I rather run a dagger into my heart? But no, 'tis plain my fate is ordained, sealed, fixed! and in vain I struggle,—I must fulfil the task appointed for me! ”

“ But some cry, ‘Ay, but this habit of disregarding misfortunes blunts your wills when you have the power to relieve them.’ Relieve! was ever such delusion? What can we relieve in the vast mass of human misfortunes? As well might we take a drop from the ocean, and cry, ‘Ha, ha! we have lessened the sea!’ What are even your public charities? what your best institutions? How few of the multitude are relieved at all; how few of that few relieved permanently! Men die, suffer, starve just as soon, and just as numerously ”

“ It has been simply that, ill, weak, worn, and suffering, I have been lost to the work of the world, and to the friends I honored and loved. Four long years have found and held me powerless to strike a blow on the great anvil of humanity, or labor one day in its vineyards, and for the most part too weak even to hear of those who did. ”

“ Would I could foresee a term to our misery!—Who but yourself shall find a remedy for our misfortunes? Shall we delay, until time brings to light that which is now a secret, and the affront we have received entail on us a shame more intolerable than death itself? ”

“ Never again would the world seem fair and beautiful. Instead, all the weary fight and desperate battle with poverty and privation over again; the dull misery and the drab gray existence, and always the pain—the heavy, dragging pain of a broken life. ”

“ I was ready to sink from fatigue and hunger; but, being surrounded by a crowd, I thought it politic to rouse all my strength, that no physical debility might be construed into apprehension or conscious guilt. Little did I then expect the calamity that was in a few moments to overwhelm me, and extinguish in horror and despair all fear of ignominy or death. ”

“ These men are broken in a hopeless and ill-matched struggle against hunger and beggary; after all their efforts, they have found everywhere a leaden vault above their heads, and a sullen opposition which has cast them down into the nether darkness of society and condemned them to a life of endless toil—toil without an object and equally destructive of mind and body. ”

“ He sweated cold drops in his misery and, to bolster his resolution, called up every shred of moral strength that remained to him. Inside him a weakened will fought with an outraged appetite, and his jangled nerves bore the stress of this struggle between determination and a frightful craving. ”

“ Thus, in the ordinary affairs of life, difficulties which threaten to impede our progress when viewed in long perspective, and from which the faint-hearted turn back in despair, when fairly encountered and grappled with, may often be overcome with half the labour and pain we contemplated. ”

“ Thus a disconcerting chance or a temporary obstacle rouses no disposition to measure strength with adversity, or to cope with untoward combinations, but an angry amazement, an indignant displeasure, a sense of trespass upon one’s lawful domain of success and happiness that result in blundering egotistic self-assertion, which often fails in the clearance of the obstruction to the paths of bland and self-satisfied progress. ”

“ Call upon men to make useless things, or things which you mean wantonly to destroy the day after to-morrow, or to which by the conditions you tolerate you make a fair length of life impossible—call upon labour to do those things, and you are either filling its spirit with misery and depression, or you are making it, in self-defence, callous and hard. ”

“ Therefore let us examine alone by ourselves the weight of our misfortunes, as if they were burdens. For the body is weighed down by the burden of what presses on it, but the soul often adds to the real load a burden of its own. ”

“ I see her trying to get other employment, failing again and again, sinking deeper into the mire of misery and despair. Then at last the time comes when the brave, proud heart is broken; the proud, sweet eyes flinch at another day of bitterness and failure. They recognise, they accent the end. ”

“ I must be pardoned for giving these distressing details; but how otherwise can I depict the misery, moral and physical, which we are enduring? And with it all, I dare not venture to hope that we have reached the climax of our sufferings. ”

“ You are hardy and valiant, life said; your shoulders are fitted to bear burdens, and bear them you shall. Here before you is a cruel burden, and you cannot turn aside. All the strong ones shall be chosen to suffer for the weak. ”

“ When our enlightened minds shall bless his sway,
Then, the strained heart of fortitude proves weak:
Our groans, our blushes, our pale cheeks declare
That he has power to inflict what we lack strength to bear. ”

“ How easy other people's burdens seem to us compared with our own! We do not realize the secret burdens which almost crush the heart, nor the years of weary waiting for delayed success—the aching hearts longing for sympathy, the hidden poverty, the suppressed emotion in other lives. ”

“ Poverty, care, anger, coldness, and indifference, the rage of passion, the obstinate retention of narrow purposes, indications of change and division in the spiritual world, entire dependence on that of Nature—in one word all that is implied in the transitory condition of human life—leaves its indelible, if quite incalculable, expression on the varied surface of the faces of mankind. ”

“ Under the oppression of such melancholy, it has been found useful to take a survey of the world, to contemplate the various scenes of distress in which mankind are struggling round us, and acquaint ourselves with the terribiles visit formæ, the various shapes of misery, which make havock of terrestrial happiness, range all corners almost without restraint, trample down our hopes at the hour of harvest, and, when we have built our schemes to the top, ruin their foundations. ”

“ I know not what unholy thoughts shot through my worn and weakened brain. I saw in the gloomiest colours a future of ceaseless struggle, of dependence, and of humiliation, which I was approaching by the dark gate of hunger; I felt a profound and utter disgust of life ”

“ What a difficulty do I see before me! A difficulty all the greater because it depends less on actual facts than on the cowardice of those who dare not look the difficulty in the face. Let us at least venture to state our problem. ”

“ He thought for the first time with understanding of words which had before seemed to him empty: the struggle of life; the hardness of life. Now he knew for himself that life is hard and full of suffering. ”

“ Forgotten little units in our disdainful world, we pass them scornfully by. Other lives, and perhaps better, do you think? For them the struggle never came which holds us in a fist of brass, and thrashes us up and down the pavement of life. ”

“ I wonder why it is that I must forever feel compelled to take the rough things of the world. Why can't I excuse myself from the overpowering and disagreeable struggles? I can not tell, but after such a day as yesterday, my heart fails me—almost. ”

“ For the mind, oppressed and weighed down by its sorrows, sinks into a weak and timorous despondency; inclining us to submit, almost without resistance, to the incumbent affliction; or if we struggle at all with it, it is only to ease the labouring heart by putting forth some fruitless sighs and ineffectual complainings. ”

“ Of most of us affrighted and diseased,
But rather by the common snarls of life
That come to test us and to strengthen us
In this the prentice-age of discontent,
Rebelliousness, faint-heartedness, and shame. ”

“ An end should be put to the burden which weighs upon the higher classes—the burden, I mean, of having to be ready every moment to expose life and limb to the mercy of anyone who takes it into his rascally head to be coarse, rude, foolish or malicious. ”

“ The common burden of life we have, indeed, all to bear—and they are not very gracious or lovely souls who seek to put it off on others—but for this additional burden, this burden of "being consistent" and having a "strong character," does it seem very wise, in so brief an interval, to put the stress just there? ”

“ Bound down by the greed of gain! So that the nobler powers of mind and body, and soul, are degraded and cramped in them—men and women slaves of superstition, slaves of prodigies and foolish fancies wrought into their very nature. ”

“ I see not what more can be done directly, and I see not why these things should not be done. Still some will suffer: the idle, the lazy, the proud who will not work, the careless who will voluntarily waste their time, their strength, or their goods—they must suffer, they ought to suffer. ”

“ Then compare with all this the duties, difficulties, and dangers of the state of life upon which you purpose to enter. If you feel compelled to say to yourself: "When I remember the weakness of my will and the force of the temptations which assail me, I do not think that I am capable of fulfilling the duties of that state, or of overcoming the difficulties which it presents," it becomes plain that this road to heaven is too steep for you. ”

“ And what shall I say more? for the time would fail me to innumerate the evils of intemperance, dissipation, debauchery, pride, luxury, idleness, extravagance, avarice and ambition, hatred and envy, priestcraft and persecution, with all their attendant train of troubles, miseries, pains, diseases and deaths; which have all contributed to reduce mankind to a state of wretchedness and sorrow indescribable. ”

“ And greed exists. And envy exists. And jealousy exists.
But as the struggle for mere existence grows less—and it is less than it used to be, although the sense of uncertainty may have increased—we have an opportunity to release some of the finer motives. ”

“ What energies a difficult crisis called forth! How her spirit and self-possession bore up in the midst of danger and insult, and how she contrived to preserve her dignity even while compelled to make the most humiliating concessions! ”

“ Cursed with an ambition which would not let him rest, which ever urged him to new struggles, new extravagances, new ventures, and contrariwise cursed with a sensitiveness, a cowardice that made each step in the path of his career an added terror to his brain, each rough encounter a fresh misery, each rebuff a stinging agony. ”

“ When we turn to the page of history, and read of men visited by adversity—what do we say to those of their fellow-creatures who fall off from them on account of their misfortunes? Do we not call them little-minded, and visit them with our contempt? ”

“ Should misfortune bring poverty, and the Almighty try his creatures by affliction, how beautiful is it then to behold the exertions which the finest minds are capable of making when sustained by religious submission, and encouraged by fond affection; but to place ourselves willingly in situations which our strength may not prove sufficient to admit of our filling conscientiously, is to presume upon our own powers, and is therefore dangerous. ”